4 comments:

just read the Klein article and did a fair bit of self re-education on wiki into epicureanism and related philosophy. after removing my ignorance i discovered epicureanism is an amazing philosophy based on the non-agression principle and the idea of mutually beneficial behaviour and, ultimately, the pursuit of happiness.no small wonder then that all the critical comments on the Klein article repeatedly mentioned things like the "social cost," "effects on society," and "socio-economic problems." im sure noone around here would be surprised to find that socialists dont like individualism or happiness.

Yes - interesting those stats on smokers dying in Ireland - hard really to know where to start there are so many errors.

1. The quote from the CSO that the biggest cause of death is 'old age'. There is no such thing as dying of old age. Old age is not a disease. What are these people dying from? Heart failure? Chest infection? A TIA ? - It matters because the cause of death may have been exacerbated by a factor such as smoking.

2. The person making these calculations is making school boy errors in their arithmetic. If 6000 smokers die each year there are no stats saying they all died from smoking related diseases. They may have been knocked down by a car. So you can’t say that a mortality rate of 21% is ascribable to any single cause. Until you break down the causes of the smokers deaths the mortality rate statistic is meaningless.

3. moreover neither can you say that as 31% of the Irish population smoke that means an Irish smoker has a greater chance of surviving than a non smoker (as smoker supposedly only has a 21% chance of dying) . You are arbitrarily dividing the country into two groups – smokers and non smokers. But again as someone can die of anything (the 69% non smokers will includes infant mortalities too - ) the two figures (smokers and non smokers ) are not equivalents. Therefore the statistic is invalid

4 the last paragraph is even worse. It builds on the first two errors and comes up with an utterly ludicrous figure for p (probability of dying).

If you want to prove black is white, you can turn water into wine and cigarettes don’t cause disease – you just carry on there – but you are going to have to do a lot better than this garbage